Chances Are (47 page)

He was marking the ones he wanted to enlarge when he hit the ones of her with her son Joey, and it all changed in an instant.

“Jesus,” he breathed. Everything he had hoped for was there in those pictures. He’d been right after all. This was cover material. The kind of evocative portrait that pulled an emotional response from everyone who saw it. Sorrow rose up from the flat image and sucked the air from his lungs. That beautiful shot of a mother and child was drenched in it. He knew from the transcripts, the authorized ones, that Joey had been hospitalized a few times over the winter, but even that didn’t explain the haunted expression in her eyes or the feeling that the answers were right there in front of him if he only knew how to look.

Think,
he told himself.
Think harder
. The pieces were all there, but what did they add up to?

Gina. The expression in her eyes. The tape Crystal made. Joey with the straight nose and freckles, the dark blue eyes and thick black lashes, the cleft in his chin—

That was it. He had noticed it the first time he saw Joey, but it hadn’t held any real significance at all for him. A random coincidence in a world filled with them. But this was a hell of a lot more than a coincidence. Gina’s kid was a dead ringer for Claire’s son . . . and Claire’s son was a dead ringer for his father, Billy O’Malley.

 
THE GUARD AT the lighthouse shook his head. “Nope, he never showed up. He was supposed to be here at two, but—” he looked at his watch “—it’s two forty-five now, and no sign of him.”

Claire had been nursing a pretty healthy head of steam since seeing Maddy’s car parked in front of the Women’s Health Cooperative, and this pushed her temper into the red zone.

“He didn’t call to cancel?”

“Nobody does,” the man said. “They figure what else do we have to do out here?” He gave her a friendly smile. “I have fifteen minutes until it’s time to lock up. If you want the
Reader’s Digest
tour, I’d be glad to oblige.”

She wanted the tour about as much as she wanted another round of root canal, but the man was being very gracious, and she was probably too angry to get behind the wheel of a car. She needed to cool off, both physically and emotionally, before she set off for home, or else she might force some poor unsuspecting motorist into a ditch if he so much as looked in his rearview mirror.

The guy walked her around the outside of the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage, a plain, one-story shingled cottage with double-hung windows and shutters that had been functional rather than decorative.

“The keepers must have had small families,” she said, peering into the tiny structure. “No room for a brood like mine.”

She admired the small garden behind the house and the stone pathway that led down to the beach then followed the guard across the lawn to the lighthouse itself.

“This isn’t the original,” he was saying. “The original was erected in 1834, but a storm took it out ten years later. They didn’t manage to find the money for a new one until after the Civil War. This lighthouse was in continuous use from 1871 until 1946 when it was shut down permanently and . . .”

How much useless information was he going to spout? Why didn’t he shut up before she did something really terrible then buried his body under the azalea bushes?
You’re losing it. The guy’s giving you a guided tour. What the hell is your problem?
The poor man wasn’t doing anything wrong. His only misfortune was being in the wrong place at the wrong time when the person she really wanted to stuff under the azaleas was the son of a bitch who hadn’t bothered to show up.

Maybe that had been his plan all along. Maybe he had waited eight years for the chance to let her know exactly how he had felt on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. She understood all about revenge and retribution. Over the years she had plotted all manner of grisly scenarios that usually involved her husband and half of the female population of Paradise Point. For all she knew, Corin was parked somewhere up the road, laughing his ass off while she toured the outside of a locked lighthouse with a guy who didn’t even know she hadn’t heard a word he said.

Oh damn. She was going to cry. Right there in front of a perfect stranger who had already figured her for the loser she was. She hated women who cried over men. Anger was better. Anger didn’t smack of martyrdom, and she had had enough of being viewed as Poor St. Claire, patron saint of wronged wives, to last a lifetime.

The tour limped to a close. The de facto guide had taken a long lunch in order to show Corin around, and now he had to get back to his office doing whatever it was he did to earn a living. He invited her to enjoy the grounds or maybe walk the beach, then said good-bye.

They shook hands, and she barely managed to control the wild desire to lay waste to everything in her path. The lighthouse. The keeper’s cottage. Every tree and plant and shrub. If she could grab the ocean with her bare hands and wring it dry, she would. She had spent too much time waiting for a husband who didn’t come home when he should to ever wait for another man again as long as she lived. He set her up, and she walked right into the trap like the pathetic fool she had always been.

She was in her car and about to turn the ignition key when she saw him turn into the driveway. He beeped his horn twice and gestured for her to wait, but she started the engine and threw the car into reverse.

“Fuck you,” she said out loud as she started backing out of her parking spot. She wasn’t going to be played for a fool by any man over the age of reason. Never again.

She slammed on her brakes as he angled his rental car behind her to block her exit. Two could play that game. She leaned on the horn, a long, loud, angry blare that she hoped could be heard in Philadelphia, but he refused to move.

Her car was old and battered. Another ding would just get lost in the shuffle. She threw the gears into reverse again and backed into his passenger door just hard enough to make her presence known.

“You better move that thing,” she yelled out her open window, “because I’ll drive right over it if I have to.”

He didn’t move. What did he care? It was a rental.

She nudged the car again, harder this time.

He still didn’t move.

He wanted closure? She’d give him closure. She leaped out of her car and thumped the hood of his rental with a closed fist.

“Move!” she yelled in the voice of a crazy woman. “I swear to God if you don’t move in the next ten seconds, I’ll push you and that car straight into the ocean.”

Clearly she had lost her mind. She hadn’t a clue how you pushed a car into the Atlantic, but she was more than willing to figure it out on the fly. She didn’t care how she looked, how she sounded, what he thought of her. She just wanted him to move that damn piece of junk so she could escape.

“Move!” she yelled again. The last time she had felt anything close to this kind of blind rage was on the steps of the church on the day of Billy’s funeral when she had torn into his grandmother Irene like she had set the fire that took her husband’s life.

“Claire.” She hadn’t even seen him get out of his car. The man had balls, she’d give him that. A sane person would have kept a zip code of distance between them. “Let me explain.”

“I don’t give a damn about your explanations. Just move that car so I can get out of here.”

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t back away. He moved closer. The man was certifiable. “I got hung up. I called Liv for your cell number. You didn’t answer, so I left a voice mail—”

“I have five kids. I always answer.”

What was the matter with him? She had caught him flat-out lying, and he still didn’t back down. “Check for messages. I didn’t even know if you’d be here, but I called anyway.”

“If you’re such a Good Samaritan, why didn’t you phone the poor guy who left work to show you around?”

“I tried, but the choice finally came down to standing there making phone calls or getting here as fast as I could.”

“Shut up. I don’t want to hear your excuses. Just get out of my way so I can go home and pick up my son.”

“Check your messages, Claire. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

So he wanted to prolong the charade a little longer? Okay, why not? It wouldn’t kill her to humor him. It might even be fun. She stormed back to her car, fumbled through her bag, then yanked out her cell phone.

“It’s off,” she said, astonished. “It’s never off.”

He didn’t say
I told you so,
but he might as well have. She could hear his words just the same.

“I wouldn’t do that to you, Claire.” He was standing so close she could smell the residue of soap on his skin. “You deserve better.”

She did deserve better. She knew that. Her anger deflated like a punctured balloon.

“I’m sorry,” she managed, clutching the cell phone in trembling hands. “It’s just that—”

“I know.” His voice was soft, so tender, the voice she had heard in her dreams. “I know. . . .”

He
did
know. That was the amazing thing. He always had. From the very beginning he had seen her the way she really was, stripped of the titles
daughter
and
mother
and
wife.
Nobody else had ever seen her that way or known her so intimately and probably never would. She was far too good now at camouflage.

“I’m dreaming,” she breathed as they moved into each other’s arms. “You’re not real.”

“I’m real.” His lips brushed hers lightly, and she gasped at the forgotten power of a kiss. “You’re very real.” His lips found hers again, quickly, sweetly, and all the pain, all the sadness, all the anger that had flooded her just moments ago washed away like words written in sand.

He pulled her closer, and her body seemed to melt into his.
Be careful,
a small voice warned.
You’re lonely, and it’s been a very long time. Don’t read too much into a man’s touch just because you need to feel his body against yours, smell the familiar scent of his skin, savor the sweet, remembered taste of his mouth.

It all came rushing back to her, all the things she had wanted to believe were figments of a lonely woman’s imagination, the product of a specific time and place and of an emptiness so deep she had been afraid she would die of it.

“Nothing’s changed,” he said when they broke apart, gasping for breath.

“Everything has.”

“Not the way I feel about you.”

“You don’t even know me,” she said. “Not anymore. I’m not the same woman you met in Florida.”

He brushed her hair away from her eyes. “I’m Corin,” he said. “Who are you?” A silly, slightly mocking request that carried more weight than either one had expected.

“I don’t know,” she said softly. “I used to be so sure about everything, but now . . .” Her words trailed off into the sweet afternoon breeze.

“Don’t move.” He sprinted back to his rental, leaned through the open driver’s-side window, and pulled out an armful of yellow roses.

“Yellow roses!” She buried her face in the fragrant mass. “I can’t believe you remembered.”

“Yellow roses not red, mocha ice cream sodas, champagne cocktails, hamburgers medium rare with pickles and red onions,
Frasier
but not
Friends
, yes to rock, no to rap, anything but basketball, and a happy ending whenever possible.”

Her own family wouldn’t have been able to come up with that list.

“How long do we have?” he asked as she gently laid the flowers on the front seat of her car.

She checked her watch. “Sixty minutes, and then Cinderella turns back into a soccer mom.”

He took her hand, and they ran down the path to the beach. She had the surprising sense that they had somehow picked up where they had left off, resuming a conversation interrupted almost nine years ago on another beach.

“I’ve lived near the ocean my whole life,” she said as they strolled along the water’s edge, “but somehow I never get tired of it.”

“I’m that way about mountains,” he said, stopping to snap a lone sandpiper standing ankle deep in foam.

“You once said you were going to do a book on mountain ranges. No captions. Just photos.”

“I said a lot of things but didn’t get around to too many of them.”

“You’ve done more than most people.”

“Easy to mistake action for accomplishment.”

“What happened to the brash young man I met in Florida?”

“He turned forty. An album of pretty pictures isn’t a hell of a lot to show for a man’s life.”

“Depends on the man and what he’s looking for.”

“I found what I was looking for a long time ago, Claire.”

She shook her head. “You think you did, but—”

“I’m not a kid. What I felt for you was real, Claire.” He paused. “It
is
real.”

“I never meant to hurt you.”

“That’s the hell of it, isn’t it.” He leaned against an outcropping of rock and pulled her close to him. “You never meant to hurt me, and I never meant to fall in love.”

“We were a family,” she said. “That meant much more to both Billy and to me than either one of us had realized.”

“You made the right choice.”

She looked into his eyes. “You mean that?”

It was always hard for a man to make the connection between a woman’s pregnant belly and a real live child who walked and talked and brought chaos wherever he went. She could almost see him connecting the dots.

“He’s a great kid, Claire. I hope his father knew how lucky he was.”

“We were both lucky,” she said. “I don’t know if he had a premonition that he didn’t have much time left, but everything was different after we got back from Florida.” She laughed softly at the look on his face. “I didn’t say perfect, I said different. At least I know I wasn’t sharing him with anyone else at the end. I don’t think I could have handled that.”

He didn’t say anything. His expression didn’t change. But she had the sense that he didn’t quite believe her.